Today, portable devices such as laptops, portable media players, remote control devices and many other devices are challenged with achieving a sleek and desirable “look and feel” and industrial design while simultaneously addressing the growing requirements to take multiple types of hardware input—in order to interact with the increasingly powerful and complex software residing on these devices. Two common kinds of hardware input commonly deployed for user interfaces on computing devices, such as portable media players and remote control devices, include mechanical switches and touch sensitive sensors.
Mechanical switches, such as toggle switches, throw switches, dial switches, slide switches, etc. are termed “mechanical” because they have moving parts which engage or disengage electrical connection(s) to produce a desired result. Mechanical buttons provide a good example of mechanical switches used for input devices. As a common “on/off” scenario for a mechanical button, when the mechanical button is pressed and thus physically moved, a connection becomes engaged, producing a desired result such as “device on.” Then, when the button is released (or pressed again, or moved the other direction, etc.), the connection is disengaged, producing another desired result such as “device off.” The device responds to the actuation of the mechanical switches. One can appreciate that there are a variety of mechanical switches that are known in the art that behave in a more complex manner than “on/off” as well.
In contrast to mechanical switches, touch sensitive input pads operate in response to sensors that detect touch by the user. For instance, capacitive touch pads are an example of touch sensitive input pads which operate by sensing capacitance between sensors, in this case, measuring the capacitance of a user's finger (more accurately, the user's whole arm) in contact with the touchpad. Typically, capacitive sensors are laid out along horizontal and vertical axes of the touchpad and the location of the user's finger is determined from the capacitance measured by the capacitive sensors.
Some touchpads also have “hotspots,” which are locations on a touchpad that indicate user intentions other than some primary functionality. For example, on certain touchpads, moving one's finger along the right edge of the touch pad will control the scrollbar and vertically scroll the current window. Similarly, moving the finger on the bottom of the touchpad can scroll a window in the horizontal direction. Some touchpads can also emulate multiple mouse buttons by either tapping in a special corner of the pad, or by tapping with two or more fingers.
Today, touchpads are primarily found in portable laptop computers, because alternative mouse devices require a flat table adjacent to use of the device. Touchpads can be advantageous because short finger movements can be used to move the cursor adequately across the display screen, i.e., some user's prefer the compact movement to the movement of a mouse device. Standalone mechanical buttons, such as buttons, slider bars, dials, etc. are also quite commonly found on devices. However, hardware input functionality above and beyond the state of the art is desired in view of mounting sophistication of devices and underlying software, and thus improved hardware user interfaces combining capacitive and mechanical hardware input technologies are desired.